by Mark Place
‘And is that in fact so?’
‘Sheila said she had no recollection of having done anything for Miss Pebmarsh. But that is not quite conclusive, Inspector. After all, the girls go out so often to different people at different places that they would be unlikely to remember if it had taken place some months ago. Sheila wasn’t very definite on the point. She only said that she couldn’t remember having been there. But really, Inspector, even if this was a hoax, I cannot see where your interest comes in?’
‘I am just coming to that. When Miss Webb arrived at 19, Wilbraham Crescent she walked into the house and into the sitting-room. She has told me that those were the directions given her. You agree?’
‘Quite right,’ said Miss Martindale. ‘Miss Pebmarsh said that she might be a little late in getting home and that Sheila was to go in and wait.’
‘When Miss Webb went into the sitting-room,’ continued Hardcastle, ‘she found a dead man lying on the floor.’
Miss Martindale stared at him. For a moment she could hardly find her voice.
‘Did you say a dead man , Inspector?’
‘A murdered man,’ said Hardcastle. ‘Stabbed, actually.’
‘Dear, dear,’ said Miss Martindale. ‘The girl must have been very upset.’
It seemed the kind of understatement characteristic of Miss Martindale.
‘Does the name of Curry mean anything to you, Miss Martindale? Mr R. H. Curry?’
‘I don’t think so, no.’
‘From the Metropolis and Provincial Insurance Company?’
Miss Martindale continued to shake her head.
‘You see my dilemma,’ said the inspector. ‘You say Miss Pebmarsh telephoned you and asked for Sheila Webb to go to her house at three o’clock. Miss Pebmarsh denies doing any such thing. Sheila Webb gets there. She finds a dead man there.’ He waited hopefully. Miss Martindale looked at him blankly. ‘It all seems to me wildly improbable,’ she said disapprovingly.
Dick Hardcastle sighed and got up. ‘Nice place you’ve got here,’ he said politely. ‘You’ve been in business some time, haven’t you?’
‘Fifteen years. We have done extremely well. Starting in quite a small way, we have extended the business until we have almost more than we can cope with. I now employ eight girls, and they are kept busy all the time.’
‘You do a good deal of literary work, I see.’ Hardcastle was looking up at the photographs on the wall.
‘Yes, to start with I specialized in authors. I had been secretary to the well-known thriller writer, Mr Garry Gregson, for many years. In fact, it was with a legacy from him that I started this Bureau. I knew a good many of his fellow authors and they recommended me. My specialized knowledge of authors’ requirements came in very useful. I offer a very helpful service in the way of necessary research—dates and quotations, inquiries as to legal points and police procedure, and details of poison schedules. All that sort of thing. Then foreign names and addresses and restaurants for people who set their novels in foreign places. In old days the public didn’t really mind so much about accuracy, but nowadays readers take it upon themselves to write to authors on every possible occasion, pointing out flaws.’
Miss Martindale paused. Hardcastle said politely: ‘I’m sure you have every cause to congratulate yourself.’
He moved towards the door. I opened it ahead of him. In the outer office, the three girls were preparing to leave. Lids had been placed on typewriters. The receptionist, Edna, was standing forlornly, holding in one hand a stiletto heel and in the other a shoe from which it had been torn.
‘I’ve only had them a month,’ she was wailing. ‘And they were quite expensive. It’s that beastly grating—the one at the corner by the cake shop quite near here. I caught my heel in it and off it came. I couldn’t walk, had to take both shoes off and come back here with a couple of buns, and how I’ll ever get home or get on to the bus I really don’t know—’
At that moment our presence was noted and Edna hastily concealed the offending shoe with an apprehensive glance towards Miss Martindale whom I appreciated was not the sort of woman to approve of stiletto heels. She herself was wearing sensible flat-heeled leather shoes.
‘Thank you, Miss Martindale,’ said Hardcastle. ‘I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your time. If anything should occur to you’
‘Naturally,’ said Miss Martindale, cutting him short rather brusquely.
As we got into the car, I said: ‘So Sheila Webb’s story, in spite of your suspicions, turns out to have been quite true.’
‘All right, all right,’ said Dick. ‘You win.’
Chapter 5
‘Mom!’ said Ernie Curtin, desisting for a moment from his occupation of running a small metal model up and down the window pane, accompanying it with a semi-zooming, semi-moaning noise intended to reproduce a rocket ship going through outer space on its way to Venus, ‘Mom, what d’you think?’
Mrs Curtin, a stern-faced woman who was busy washing up crockery in the sink, made no response.
‘Mom, there’s a police car drawn up outside our house.’
‘Don’t you tell no more of yer lies, Ernie,’ said Mrs Curtin as she banged cups and saucers down on the draining board. ‘You know what I’ve said to you about that before.’
‘I never,’ said Ernie virtuously. ‘And it’s a police car right enough, and there’s two men gettin’ out.’
Mrs Curtin wheeled round on her offspring.
‘What’ve you been doing now?’ she demanded. ‘Bringing us into disgrace, that’s what it is!’
‘Course I ain’t,’ said Ernie. ‘I ’aven’t done nothin’.’
‘It’s going with that Alf,’ said Mrs Curtin. ‘Him and his gang. Gangs indeed! I’ve told you, and yer father’s told you, that gangs isn’t respectable. In the end there’s trouble. First it’ll be the juvenile court and then you’ll be sent to a remand home as likely as not. And I won’t have it, d’you hear?’
‘They’re comin’ up to the front door,’ Ernie announced.
Mrs Curtin abandoned the sink and joined her offspring at the window.
‘Well,’ she muttered.
At that moment the knocker was sounded. Wiping her hands quickly on the tea-towel, Mrs Curtin went out into the passage and opened the door. She looked with defiance and doubt at the two men on her doorstep. ‘Mrs Curtin?’ said the taller of the two, pleasantly.
‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Curtin.
‘May I come in a moment? I’m Detective Inspector Hardcastle.’ Mrs Curtin drew back rather unwillingly. She threw open a door and motioned the inspector inside. It was a very neat, clean little room and gave the impression of seldom being entered, which impression was entirely correct. Ernie, drawn by curiosity, came down the passage from the kitchen and sidled inside the door.
‘Your son?’ said Detective Inspector Hardcastle.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Curtin, and added belligerently, ‘he’s a good boy, no matter what you say.’
‘I’m sure he is,’ said Detective Inspector Hardcastle, politely.
Some of the defiance in Mrs Curtin’s face relaxed.
‘I’ve come to ask you a few questions about 19, Wilbraham Crescent. You work there, I understand.’
‘Never said I didn’t,’ said Mrs Curtin, unable yet to shake off her previous mood.
‘For a Miss Millicent Pebmarsh.’
‘Yes, I work for Miss Pebmarsh. A very nice lady.’
‘Blind,’ said Detective Inspector Hardcastle.
‘Yes, poor soul. But you’d never know it. Wonderful the way she can put her hand on anything and find her way about. Goes out in the street, too, and over the crossings. She’s not one to make a fuss about things, not like some people I know.’
‘You work there in the mornings?’
‘That’s right. I come about half past nine to ten, and leave at twelve o’clock or when I’m finished.’ Then sharply, ‘You’re not saying as anything ’as been stolen, are you?’
> ‘Quite the reverse,’ said the inspector, thinking of four clocks.
Mrs Curtin looked at him uncomprehendingly.
‘What’s the trouble?’ she asked.
‘A man was found dead in the sitting-room at 19, Wilbraham Crescent this afternoon.’
Mrs Curtin stared. Ernie Curtin wriggled in ecstasy, opened his mouth to say ‘Coo’, thought it unwise to draw attention to his presence, and shut it again.
‘Dead?’ said Mrs Curtin unbelievingly. And with even more unbelief, ‘In the sitting-room?’
‘Yes. He’d been stabbed.’
‘You mean it’s murder?’
‘Yes, murder.’
‘Oo murdered ’im?’ demanded Mrs Curtin.
‘I’m afraid we haven’t got quite so far as that yet,’ said Inspector Hardcastle. ‘We thought perhaps you may be able to help us.’
‘I don’t know anything about murder,’ said Mrs Curtin positively.
‘No, but there are one or two points that have arisen. This morning, for instance, did any man call at the house?’
‘Not that I can remember. Not today. What sort of man was he?’
‘An elderly man about sixty, respectably dressed in a dark suit. He may have represented himself as an insurance agent.’
‘I wouldn’t have let him in,’ said Mrs Curtin. ‘No insurance agents and nobody selling vacuum cleaners or editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Nothing of that sort. Miss Pebmarsh doesn’t hold with selling at the door and neither do I.’
‘The man’s name, according to a card that was on him, was Mr Curry. Have you ever heard that name?’
‘Curry? Curry?’ Mrs Curtin shook her head. ‘Sounds Indian to me,’ she said, suspiciously.
‘Oh, no,’ said Inspector Hardcastle, ‘he wasn’t an Indian.’
‘Who found him—Miss Pebmarsh?’
‘A young lady, a shorthand typist, had arrived because, owing to a misunderstanding, she thought she’d been sent for to do some work for Miss Pebmarsh. It was she who discovered the body. Miss Pebmarsh returned almost at the same moment.’
Mrs Curtin uttered a deep sigh.
‘What a to-do,’ she said, ‘what a to-do!’
‘We may ask you at some time,’ said Inspector Hardcastle, ‘to look at this man’s body and tell us if he is a man you have ever seen in Wilbraham Crescent or calling at the house before. Miss Pebmarsh is quite positive he has never been there. Now there are various small points I would like to know. Can you recall off-hand how many clocks there are in the sitting-room?’
Mrs Curtin did not even pause. ‘There’s that big clock in the corner, grandfather they call it, and there’s the cuckoo clock on the wall. It springs out and says “cuckoo”. Doesn’t half make you jump sometimes.’ She added hastily, ‘I didn’t touch neither of them. I never do. Miss Pebmarsh likes to wind them herself.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with them,’ the inspector assured her. ‘You’re sure these were the only two clocks in the room this morning?’
‘Of course. What others should there be?’
‘There was not, for instance, a small square silver clock, what they call a carriage clock, or a little gilt clock—on the mantelpiece that was, or a china clock with flowers on it—or a leather clock with the name Rosemary written across the corner?’
‘Of course there wasn’t. No such thing.’
‘You would have noticed them if they had been there?’
‘Of course I should.’
‘Each of these four clocks represented a time about an hour later than the cuckoo clock and the grandfather clock.’
‘Must have been foreign,’ said Mrs Curtin. ‘Me and my old man went on a coach trip to Switzerland and Italy once and it was a whole hour further on there. Must be something to do with this Common Market. I don’t hold with the Common Market and nor does Mr Curtin. England’s good enough for me.’
Inspector Hardcastle declined to be drawn into politics.
‘Can you tell me exactly when you left Miss Pebmarsh’s house this morning?’
‘Quarter past twelve, near as nothing,’ said Mrs Curtin.
‘Was Miss Pebmarsh in the house then?’
‘No, she hadn’t come back. She usually comes back sometime between twelve and half past, but it varies.’
‘And she had left the house—when?’
‘Before I got there. Ten o’clock’s my time.’
‘Well, thank you, Mrs Curtin.’
‘Seems queer about these clocks,’ said Mrs Curtin. ‘Perhaps Miss Pebmarsh had been to a sale.
Antiques, were they? They sound like it by what you say.’
‘Does Miss Pebmarsh often go to sales?’
‘Got a roll of hair carpet about four months ago at a sale. Quite good condition. Very cheap, she told me. Got some velour curtains too. They needed cutting down, but they were really as good as new.’
‘But she doesn’t usually buy bric-à-brac or things like pictures or china or that kind of thing at sales?’
Mrs Curtin shook her head.
‘Not that I’ve ever known her, but of course, there’s no saying in sales, is there? I mean, you get carried away. When you get home you say to yourself “whatever did I want with that?” Bought six pots of jam once. When I thought about it I could have made it cheaper myself. Cups and saucers, too. Them I could have got better in the market on a Wednesday. ’She shook her head darkly. Feeling that he had no more to learn for the moment, Inspector Hardcastle departed. Ernie then made his contribution to the subject that had been under discussion. ‘Murder! Coo!’ said Ernie.
Momentarily the conquest of outer space was displaced in his mind by a present-day subject of really thrilling appeal.
‘Miss Pebmarsh couldn’t have done ’im in, could she?’ he suggested yearningly.
‘Don’t talk so silly,’ said his mother. A thought crossed her mind. ‘I wonder if I ought to have told him—’
‘Told him what, Mom?’
‘Never you mind,’ said Mrs Curtin. ‘It was nothing, really.’
Chapter 6
Colin Lamb’s Narrative
I
When we had put ourselves outside two good underdone steaks, washed down with draught beer, Dick Hardcastle gave a sigh of comfortable repletion, announced that he felt better and said:
‘To hell with dead insurance agents, fancy clocks and screaming girls! Let’s hear about you, Colin. I thought you’d finished with this part of the world. And here you are wandering about the back streets of Crowdean. No scope for a marine biologist at Crowdean, I can assure you.’
‘Don’t you sneer at marine biology, Dick. It’s a very useful subject. The mere mention of it so bores people and they’re so afraid you’re going to talk about it, that you never have to explain yourself further.’
‘No chance of giving yourself away, eh?’
‘You forget,’ I said coldly, ‘that I am a marine biologist. I took a degree in it at Cambridge. Not a very good degree, but a degree. It’s a very interesting subject, and one day I’m going back to it.’
‘I know what you’ve been working on, of course,’ said Hardcastle. ‘And congratulations to you.
Larkin’s trial comes on next month, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Amazing the way he managed to carry on passing stuff out for so long. You’d think somebody would have suspected.’
‘They didn’t, you know. When you’ve got it into your head that a fellow is a thoroughly good chap, it doesn’t occur to you that he mightn’t be.’
‘He must have been clever,’ Dick commented.
I shook my head.
‘No, I don’t think he was, really. I think he just did as he was told. He had access to very important documents. He walked out with them, they were photographed and returned to him, and they were back again where they belonged the same day. Good organization there. He made a habit of lunching at different places every day. We think that he hung up his overcoat where t
here was always an overcoat exactly like it—though the man who wore the other overcoat wasn’t always the same man. The overcoats were switched, but the man who switched them never spoke to Larkin, and Larkin never spoke to him. We’d like to know a good deal more about the mechanics of it. It was all very well planned with perfect timing. Somebody had brains.’
‘And that’s why you’re still hanging round the Naval Station at Portlebury?’
‘Yes, we know the Naval end of it and we know the London end. We know just when and where Larkin got his pay and how. But there’s a gap. In between the two there’s a very pretty little bit of organization. That’s the part we’d like to know more about, because that’s the part where the brains are.
Somewhere there’s a very good headquarters, with excellent planning, which leaves a trail that is confused not once but probably seven or eight times.’
‘What did Larkin do it for?’ asked Hardcastle, curiously. ‘Political idealist? Boosting his ego? Or plain money?’
‘He was no idealist,’ I said. ‘Just money, I’d say.’
‘Couldn’t you have got on to him sooner that way? He spent the money, didn’t he? He didn’t salt it away.’
‘Oh, no, he splashed it about all right. Actually, we got on to him a little sooner than we’re admitting.’
Hardcastle nodded his head understandingly.
‘I see. You tumbled and then you used him for a bit. Is that it?’
‘More or less. He had passed out some quite valuable information before we got on to him, so we let him pass out more information, also apparently valuable. In the Service I belong to, we have to resign ourselves to looking fools now and again.’
‘I don’t think I’d care for your job, Colin,’ said Hardcastle thoughtfully.
‘It’s not the exciting job that people think it is,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact, it’s usually remarkably tedious. But there’s something beyond that. Nowadays one gets to feeling that nothing really is secret. We know Their secrets and They know our secrets. Our agents are often Their agents, too, and Their agents are very often our agents. And in the end who is double-crossing who becomes a kind of nightmare!
Sometimes I think that everybody knows everybody else’s secrets and that they enter into a kind of conspiracy to pretend that they don’t.’
